He was raised in juvenile hall. Now he’s reaching out to kids behind bars

Ron Climer, executive director of Changing Lives Resource Center in Clovis and a juvenile hall chaplain, and wife Carol, with some of the 400 notebooks they’ve collected as part of gifts for Christmas parties being held at the detention center on Dec. 4-5. This is the ministry’s 44th year throwing these parties.
JOHN WALKER
jwalker@fresnobee.com

Working with incarcerated youth is personal for Ron Climer.

The 69-year-old first found himself behind bars at age 8 for burglary. His childhood was spent in and out of the Fresno County Juvenile Justice Campus detention facility, then in and out of Fresno County Jail, until his life changed dramatically for the better at age 24.

Since then, he’s been a volunteer at the Fresno County juvenile hall. He’s the senior chaplain there and has organized annual Christmas parties for incarcerated youth for the past 44 years. Another 11 parties are planned for the first week of December, run by dozens of volunteers and funded by 16 Southern Baptist churches via Climer’s nonprofit, Changing Lives Resource Center in Clovis.

There are around 240 children, age 12 to 18, now in the juvenile hall, says Mike Elliott, director of the detention facility.

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During the parties, the youth play games, eat food cooked by volunteers, and receive donated gifts, toiletries and socks. Climer says for many, the gifts are the first they’ve ever received. The teens also have the option of learning about the biblical meaning of Christmas. That part is especially important to Climer, who left behind a life of crime as a young man by clinging to a new-found faith.

Changing his life

Climer started going to church in his early 20s after listening to a conversation between two men he knew. One of the men, named Leroy, was telling another, named Larry, about how his Christian faith led him to turn himself into authorities for committing 27 felonies because he wanted to “get right with God” and the people he hurt.

“He said, ‘Larry, God loves you just like you are,’” Climer recalls. “He said, ‘You don’t have to change anything. Just open up your heart and let Christ come in. He’ll change you, whatever needs to be changed.’

“I thought, ‘If God could love Leroy and he could love Larry, then maybe, if there really is a God, he could love, me, too.”

Climer was battling heroin addiction at the time. He almost decided to give up that fight, but in one of his darkest moments, he opened up a Bible instead.

“For a while I sat there and thought about the people I met in church and how they were filled with peace and joy and happiness, and Leroy, how he was. And I thought, ‘God, if this is what you’ve got for me and you’re going to give that kind of peace to those people, and I’m full of this kind of rage, take me right now.”

Climer decided he wanted to overdose on all the drugs he could find the next day. Then he heard a voice: “Put your faith in me and not in the needle and I’ll do it for you.” Climer isn’t sure if that voice was audible or just in his head, but it doesn’t matter.

“I chose to believe it was God. So I did what the Scripture said, I invited him to come into my life, and my life has never been the same since.”

Helping in juvenile hall

“You see some pretty hard-core kids who have maybe done some really bad crime, and all of a sudden, they are a kid again,” Elliott says. “We all have to remember they are kids. … Some are 6-foot-4 and 240-pound kids, but still, they are kids.”

Climer sometimes encounters people who don’t think these youth deserve Christmas parties. For those people, he shares a story he once heard about some women who turned a prayer meeting into a gossip meeting about the “town drunk.” The women ask their pastor what he thinks about the man’s drinking problem, and the pastor replies, “I think it’s terrible, just atrocious. That’s not the way that I sin at all.”

“The point is,” Climer says, “we all do our own little different things. As far as God’s concerned, sin is sin.”

Climer hopes his work helps incarcerated youth become better citizens for society and the “kingdom” of God.

“I love it as much today as I did 44 years ago. It really brings to life what Jesus said, that it is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Donations for juvenile hall Christmas parties can be made to Changing Lives Resource Center, 895 W. Ashlan Ave., Ste. 102, Clovis. People interested in volunteering through the juvenile hall chaplain program can contact Ron Climer at 559-292-5449.

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